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'Leisure Suit Larry' Is Back: An Interview With Replay Games President Paul Trowe

Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded brings the original back in full HD for PC and mobile platforms this May.

I was only five years old when Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards alliterated its way into the world, bringing its blend of puzzles and adult-only-humor along with it. Too young, in other words, to ever play it (though I played later iterations when I was older.)

Al Lowe, the creator of the franchise, left the series after 1996′s Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail.

Now Leisure Suit Larry is back, and so is Al Lowe who’s teamed up with Replay Games to bring about the second coming of In the Land of the Lounge Lizards, and an HD return of protagonist Larry Laffer, replete with new puzzles, women, and a Vegas-style soundtrack. (Award-winning Journey composer Austin Wintory is contributing to the score.)

“Although the games were marketed as “naughty,” Al Lowe’s Larry was comedic but never explicit,” reads the game description at the Replay Games website, “and the remake retains that standard. There’s no full-frontal nudity, no four-letter words, and no on-screen sex. But we do have our comedic priorities: Larry is a story of a man on the make, and the game drips with innuendo, flirts with perversity, and oozes sexuality from every pixelated pore.”

In other words, the developer is trying to stay true to the series, controversial parts and all.

It turns out, the project was in the works for quite some time—even if development only kicked off in 2011.

“We had been trying to license some of the classic Sierra titles since 2000 and only in 2011 did we realize the rights for Leisure Suit Larry were held by Codemasters,” Replay Games president Paul Trowe tells me. ”They didn’t have any plans for the franchise and we had the key team members that made the original LSL games back in the ‘80s and ‘90s the hits they are today. They realized that we would take considerable care in remaking the original games (Leisure Suit Larry 1-7) and were willing to license to us.”

Once they had the license and the right people on board, the next step was raising money to get the first game remade. Raising money for a somewhat notorious franchise turned out to be a bit more difficult than Replay had anticipated.

“We approached a number of small-cap VCs as well as Angel Investors but it seemed like the traditional investor community perceived the property to be based mainly around sex,” said Trowe, “whereas in reality Leisure Suit Larry is a classic and widely recognized franchise that is all about a lack of sex and relies heavily on more innocent, yet suggestive innuendo rather than blatant sexual content.”

Trowe says they tried to educate the investors, but everyone they spoke to had basically already made up their minds. Still, luck wasn’t entirely against them.

They flew out to the D.I.C.E. summit in Las Vegas where they had the good fortune of running into Tim Schafer of Double Fine Games, whose own Kickstarter for Double Fine Adventure started the current video game crowdfunding trend we see today.

“At the time,” Trowe says, “Tim had raised over $800,000 in less than a day with a target of $400,000 and he told Al Lowe and I that while we were standing there speaking with him his Kickstarter project had pulled in over $80,000. We immediately knew he was on to something and decided to run our own Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising $500,000, enough money to do a straight “port” of the game to modern devices like PC, Mac, Linux, and of course iOS and Android.”

So the game’s Kickstarter drive was born, hitting its half million crowd-funding goal 17 days in, and ending with just over $655,000 in the bank. The extra funding allowed the development team to “completely rewrite the entire script of all the character dialogue, including the narrator, as well as add a bevy of additional content to the game” according to Trowe.

They also left their crowd-funding drive open on their own website, raising around $100,000 more. But all that extra money hasn’t led Replay to fundamentally change the core game experience, Trowe tells me.

“The thing about adventure games is they don’t need dramatic improvements in game design to make a good game. A number of people in my industry, Al [Lowe] and Josh [Mandel] included, have always said you don’t need fancy graphics or 7.1 surround sound to make an amazing game. That’s true with any genre, not just adventure games since people are looking for something to feel attachment to, like the lead character in a movie. You want to feel his/her emotions, you want him/her to win, you root and cheer for them. And this is what we give to our players, a huge sense of attachment to the character, Larry, and his surroundings. We feel we did a pretty good job at it and aspire to do it again with other franchises as well as sequels to the Larry franchise.”

Trowe also thinks the controversy surrounding Leisure Suit Larry might be a bit overblown. It’s a subject that comes up a lot when people talk with him about the game. And while he agrees it’s a controversial game, he insists that they “put the comedy center stage and make fun of it.”

He gives an example of an arcade game within the game called Angry Broads ”where you hurl our hero into a bunch of angry feminists.”

“Who can get mad at that?” Trowe says. “It’s just funny—plain and simple.”

I could hazard a guess at who might get upset with that, but Trowe says they checked in with Women In Gaming International chief Belinda Van Sickle to ask “if she thought either she or any of her members would be upset at us releasing such a game and her reaction was exactly what I was hoping for.”

“We don’t care about silly stuff like that!” Van Sickle told Trowe. “We want equal pay for women, more jobs for women in our game industry, and more recognition that women play a huge part in this multibillion dollar industry.”

For his part, Trowe says the case is closed. “Do I think we’re going to offend people?” he asks. “Yeah, I suppose so. But in this day and age you can so easily offend somebody by walking down the streen in high heels and a feather boa without having shaved your manly chest hair, so I’m not too worried about that.”

Besides, offending people can be a great way to sell copies of a game, and certainly riding that line has always been Leisure Suit Larry’s greatest talent. A bit of controversy can be great PR, especially when the game’s controversy mostly stems from its sense of humor.

Either way, it will be interesting to see how the game holds up in the year of our lord 2013. The balance between crude humor and inclusiveness is a tricky one, and especially tricky in an industry dominated by men.

Leisure Suit Larry: Reloaded will be available May 31 on PC, Mac and Linux for $19.99, and Android, iOS for $9.99.

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I love a good special edition remake as much as the next gamer who grew up on Sierra and LucasArts adventure games. I loved the Monkey Island SEs that came out a few years ago and I am totally going to buy Leisure Suit Larry 1: Reloaded. My hope is that this will rekindle enough of an interest in the LSL franchise for these devs to get together with Al Lowe and give us some brand new adventures, ones worthy of the classic games, ones that will wash away the horrible memories of those lame cash-ins starring Larry Laffer’s nephew, Larry Lovage.